Feminist Methods

So I considered taking a class this quarter called "Feminist Methods." My plate was too full for the additional course, but the title keeps ringing in my head. I know it's basically a class examining how feminist methodologies are used in research practices across the academic disciplines: history, literature, sociology, psychology, etc. But I keep thinking of all the other things this course could offer.

I sometimes feel completely baffled about how to live in a world that remains unrelentingly sexist, racist, classist, homophobic and xenophobic. Despite progress (and lip-service to progress) I feel like I run up against institutionalized inequalities every day. And I live in San Francisco! And I spend most of my time at a university! How do other people even manage?

I know I'm highly sensitive to the suffering caused by sex and gender prejudices; I always have been. And it feels like the more I learn about the world, the more sensitive I become to identity-based injustices.

I have taken many a course on how to see and analyze these injustices, but not a single one that teaches me how to deal with the difficulty of integrating this knowledge into my daily life. It's painful to walk through the world perceiving these half-visible hegemonic structures holding us all trapped in places we don't want to be. I need guidance on how to deal with the information I've gained.

If I were teaching a class called Feminist Methods, my syllabus would include these topics:

- Feminist methods for approaching the study of history without breaking down into tears when you realize that women are systematically left out of most of the juicy parts.

- Feminist methods for appreciating Western art even though 90% of the time women are stuck being the looked-at subject, not the creator.

- Feminist methods for dealing with street harassment from men, especially across cultural lines and in countries that are not your own.

- Feminist methods for thinking about and interacting with pornography in a way that celebrates sexuality, resists censorship and opposes exploitation.

- Feminist methods for getting over jealousy and competitiveness towards other women over who's prettier, sexier, smarter, more capable, more put together, etc...

- Feminist methods for not getting angry when people call you an angry feminist.

- Feminist methods for holding faith that a highly sensitive, responsive, emotional, intuitive, receptive, accepting mode of human interaction is just as valuable as an assertive, rational mode.

- Feminist methods for approaching the monumental task of motherhood with respect even though it's devalued and sentimentalized by Western culture, and usually entails sacrificing hard-won power and privileges in your professional life.

- Feminist methods for forgiving your father, since he's stuck in the system as much as you are.

- Feminist methods for not confusing your boyfriend/husband/lover/friend with the patriarchy just because he's grown up with subtle privileges of having a penis.

- Feminist methods for avoiding the psychic burnout of remaining a feminist.

If you know of any place that offers coursework like this, would you let me know? I could really use it.

And I'm sure there are topics missing from this hypothetical syllabus. What would you add?

Juliet, short and muscular

When I was 17, I played Juliet in a community theatre version of Romeo and Juliet. This was nearing the end of the phase in which I considered myself an actress. The year before, I'd played Madge in William Inge's mediocre play Picnic, a young pageant-winner described as "the prettiest girl in town." I was not an unpretty teen, but it was dawning on me that with my broad shoulders and square jaw, I wasn't quite pretty enough to be a professional actress. I felt like a fraud playing Madge, a role that Gwyneth Paltrow had played a few years before, but felt slightly more comfortable in Juliet's skin. Juliet is, after all, a tomboy. The consummate ingenue, she's also a rule-thwarting, death-unfazed badass who really, really wants to get laid.

The reviews were generally complimentary, but I couldn't get over the first few words of one critic's response: "Fairfield's Juliet, short and muscular..." What the reviewer was wrestling with wasn't my height (I'm not that short) or my unjustifiably sculpted deltoids, but the subtle genderqueerness of my teen persona. It was latent over a decade ago, but, like Juliet's lupine sexuality, was ready to pounce given the least provocation.

The lack of variety in gender expression of female actors in mainstream theatre is appalling. Blame for this can be scattered widely (and accurately) on agents, graduate schools, playwrights, heteronorm audiences, wary producers, and more. As a director, I'd like to personally call out directors for their painfully limited creativity when it comes to what versions of womanhood take center stage.

We need more dykes onstage. More tomboys and tough girls. More bois and butches and trannyboys and andros and genderfuckers. We need more subtly non-normative girls with square features and strong frames. We need tall women and deep-voiced women and short-haired women. And not just in ensemble-generated dance-theatre pieces in NYC and SF! We need butch Juliets, boyish Cozettes and dyky Blanche DuBois' on stages across the country. And we need brave directors - who trust audiences to welcome nature's spectrum of gender variance - to cast them.

Here's the deal. Under-representation of lesbian characters onstage is a serious matter, but a different one. We definitely need more stories of women loving women (playwrights: get on it, and directors: cross-gender casting, STAT!). But until the classical canon is toppled and filled with queer characters, let's remember that gender expression and sexual object-choice are not inherently linked. You can have a broad-shouldered, genderqueer female-identified ingenue pair beautifully with a leading man of any shape and size without sacrificing chemistry or believability. This short muscular Juliet was certainly in love with her sweet-faced, long-haired Romeo, but that's another story...